From the Japanese-born, literary seminar graduate of Malcolm Bradbury, winner of the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day, an exquisite novel that paradoxically combines the traditions of the “black detective story” of the 1930s and the “cultural prose” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Since childhood, the famous detective and intellectual Christopher Banks has dreamed of solving the mystery of the disappearance of his parents - and finally he has the opportunity to do this, in a very turbulent time, setting off along the London-Shanghai route. However, Christopher's investigation and his exotic journey gradually turn into a journey from the Present to the Past, from the world of illusions to the world of cruel reality.